"Israeli archaeologists said Monday they may have found the earliest evidence yet for the existence of modern man, and if so, it could upset theories of the origin of humans.

A Tel Aviv University team excavating a cave in central Israel said teeth found in the cave are about 400,000 years old and resemble those of other remains of modern man, known scientifically as Homo sapiens, found in Israel. The earliest Homo sapiens remains found until now are half as old.

"It's very exciting to come to this conclusion," said archaeologist Avi Gopher, whose team examined the teeth with X-rays and CT scans and dated them according to the layers of earth where they were found.

He stressed that further research is needed to solidify the claim. If it does, he says, "this changes the whole picture of evolution..."

"We face wrenching budget cutting in the years ahead, but there’s one huge area of government spending that Democrats and Republicans alike have so far treated as sacrosanct.

It’s the military/security world, and it’s time to bust that taboo. A few facts:

• The United States spends nearly as much on military power as every other country in the world combined, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. It says that we spend more than six times as much as the country with the next highest budget, China.

• The United States maintains troops at more than 560 bases and other sites abroad, many of them a legacy of a world war that ended 65 years ago. Do we fear that if we pull our bases from Germany, Russia might invade?

• The intelligence community is so vast that more people have “top secret” clearance than live in Washington, D.C.

• The U.S. will spend more on the war in Afghanistan this year, adjusting for inflation, than we spent on the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War combined.

This is the one area where elections scarcely matter. President Obama, a Democrat who symbolized new directions, requested about 6 percent more for the military this year than at the peak of the Bush administration.

“Republicans think banging the war drums wins them votes, and Democrats think if they don’t chime in, they’ll lose votes,” said Andrew Bacevich, an ex-military officer who now is a historian at Boston University. He is author of a thoughtful recent book, “Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War...”"

The jet fighter is a Saab Viggen on an unnamed snow-covered airbase pulling three men on toboggans who are dressed in pilots uniforms.

"For five centuries, the residents of Potosi, Bolivia, have lived and died in the mines of Cerro Rico, or "rich mountain." The name, one could argue, is painfully ironic: Although the mountain has been a veritable trove of silver, it has been imperialists, not the natives and Africans working the mines, who have enjoyed those riches. "At one point in the mid-17th century, the town's population was greater than that of London or Paris or Rome," says the photographer Evan Abramson, who has spent much of the last decade living and photographing in Bolivia. "The myth goes that at the height of excavation, you could have built a bridge made of the mountain's silver all the way back to Spain."

The mountain, which has been gutted with some 250 mines, now seems to teeter on the brink of collapse. And although the town remains one of the poorest in Bolivia, the mining continues. During the period from 2006 to 2008, when the price of minerals like silver, tin, and zinc increased some 300 percent, there was a staggering influx of work. But that increased work wasn't met with a corresponding improvement in health care or mining conditions, and residents' lifespan hovers around 50 years-15 below the national average. Daily life continues the way it has for the past 500 years..."

-- Not a fan of that text in the corner, but I do not know if this was used for an ad, or anything.

-- So this is all over the web all of a sudden, but just in case you haven't come across it and are interested to see some stupidity and carnage, this offers a good does of both. BTW, yelling at people with only your underwear on is the best way to yell at people.

"Men in the 1970s didn’t just automatically know how to look good. They had to see photos and ads of their fellow men wearing the trophies of their work…work that involved silently stalking the elusive jungle couch until it could be turned into pants."

It wasn't me. I almost wish that it was, but it wasn't.

I am not the pilot who found himself in hot water for posting scandalous security videos on YouTube.

The pilot, whose name has not been released, uploaded a series of clips taken at San Francisco International Airport. His intent was to expose the insane double standard of TSA's airport employee screening policies: Although pilots and flight attendants are required to pass through the same concourse checkpoints as passengers, many ground workers, including baggage handlers, caterers and cabin cleaners, are exempt from these checks. The YouTube segments, which have since been taken down, showed ground employees passing through a simple turnstile on their way to work. You can see some highlights from the videos in this television news report by News10 in Sacramento, Calif., where the pilot lives.

This has been TSA policy from the beginning. It is also something I've been writing about in my columns, on and off, for the past eight years. Finally the issue is getting some attention -- if not entirely for the right reasons. This should be a story about farcical security practices; instead, as the media has been playing it, it's the story of a renegade pilot.

TSA says the pilot's actions are "under review," citing the possible release of what the agency calls, "sensitive security information..."

-- So they go after this guy for revealing the obvious. The TSA is nothing more than a large scale perfomance art project.

"A provocative new study called “Placebos Without Deception,” published on PLoS One today, threatens to make humble sugar pills something they’ve rarely had a chance to be in the history of medicine: a respectable, ethically sound treatment for disease that has been vetted in controlled trials.

The word placebo is ancient, coming to us from the Latin for “I shall please.” As far back as the 14th Century, the term already had connotations of fakery, sleaze, and deception. For well-to-do Catholic families in Geoffrey Chaucer’s day, the custom at funerals was to offer a feast to the congregation after the mourners sang the Office for the Dead (which contains the phrase placebo Domino in regione vivorum, “I shall please the Lord in the land of the living”). The unintended effect of this largesse was to inspire distant relatives and former acquaintances of the departed to crawl out of the woodwork, weeping copiously while praising the deceased, then hastening to the buffet. By the time Chaucer wrote his Canterbury Tales, these macabre freeloaders had been christened “placebo singers.”

In modern medicine, placebos are associated with another form of deception — a kind that has long been thought essential for conducting randomized clinical trials of new drugs, the statistical rock upon which the global pharmaceutical industry was built. One group of volunteers in an RCT gets the novel medication; another group (the “control” group) gets pills or capsules that look identical to the allegedly active drug, but contain only an inert substance like milk sugar. These faux drugs are called placebos..."

-- An interesting read on a new study about this fascinating subject.

"Based on the japanese phenomenon of the love hotel, this pop up LLove hotel was created by eight japanese and dutch designers with themed rooms that are installations, where people can actually make a reservation and stay over night.

Initiated by amsterdam’s Lloyd hotel (the hotel’s artistic director suzanne oxenaar) and works were coordinated by jo nagasaka of the japanese architecture studio schemata."

-- All the cars in this museum-like garage are housed in a stark-white hangar like building with dedicated white platforms for each vehicle.

Photographs by Todd Eberle.

"The 19th-century Analytical Engine computer, complete with CPU and a memory, remained unbuilt – time to put that right, says John Graham-Cumming.

In 1837 British mathematician Charles Babbage described a mechanical computer that later became known as the Analytical Engine. Calling it a computer is no stretch: the Analytical Engine had a central processing unit and memory and would have been programmed with punched cards.

Parts of the Analytical Engine were built in the 1800s and are on display in the Science Museum in London along with a stack of punched cards. But Babbage never completed the project.

The computer was an extension of his well-known Difference Engine, which was designed to calculate tables of numbers such as logarithms..."

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dmanlt.com has been online since 7.9.2010. It is a website about photography, science, art, technology, nature, culture, current events and everything in between and beyond. It is written and regularly updated by Donatas Urbonas.